WUNRN
Afro-Descendant Women Organize for the Decade for People of African Descent & Beyond
30 June 2015 | By Gabby De Cicco
AWID spoke with Dorotea Wilson, General
Coordinator of the Afro-Descendant Women in Latin America, the Caribbean (LAC)
and the Diaspora, about the situation of Afro-descendant women in the region
and how they are organizing and preparing for the Decade for
People of African Descent.
AWID: What is the situation of Afro-descendant women in the
region?
Dorotea Wilson (DW): In the region, Afro-descendant populations, and
particularly women, have been rendered invisible in terms of information,
quantitative and qualitative data, and this has resulted in the lack of
creation and promotion of public policies that favour the needs of black women.
The situation is complicated by the gender inequalities that characterize the
patriarchal society, placing women in a position of subordination. And because
of the racism that exists in our societies, they are part of impoverished populations
with little and/or no access to basic services like health, education, and
productive resources as land, credit and housing.
Statistics clearly show inequalities in
employment. For instance, in Cuba, overall unemployment is 1.6%, but even
though Afro-descendant women constitute 46% of the country’s labour force,
their unemployment rate reaches 2%. In Costa Rica, Afro-descendant women
have been discriminated against in access to employment, despite having higher
levels of education, and most of them are bilingual. They are scarcely
represented in management and leading positions or in the workplace, and
poverty is over-represented in Afro-descendant majority population areas. In
the Dominican Republic census and other official surveys, data fails to include
any ethnic-racial categories so there is no data available on this population
group as a whole, or on Afro-descendant women in particular.
AWID: What are the key
issues and how should they be tackled so that Afro-descendant women in the
region can realize their rights?
DW: The first step is to have States acknowledge that there
is racism in Latin America and the Caribbean. Racism has to be confronted,
because the lack of opportunities I mentioned earlier are often a product of
racism, xenophobia, intolerance and exclusion. Unemployment and poverty are
deeply linked to them.
AWID: How should racism
be confronted?
DW: Before anything else, we need to understand that
contemporary racism is an ideology built on the Neoliberal economic model, that
is rooted in the colonization and conquest of the African continent that
started with the trans-Atlantic traffic of African persons turned into slaves
for developing and exploiting resources on the American continent. Racism is
thus based on an economic structure that ideologically builds cultural and
social justifications to place the White race as the prototype of the human,
and thus superior to all other ethnic-racial groups, and particularly to those
of African origin that were defined as the “Black” race. Even today, indigenous
people and Afro-descendants are cheaper labour in the region.
Nowadays, racism is identified more as a
social and cultural problem than as an economic problem, so we need to
deconstruct this through education, campaigns and changing the University
curricula, because many of them treat racism as something normal, a daily
matter, and because of that many Black people have not yet embraced their
identity.
In spite of national development, of racism
having been abolished more then 300 years ago, of human rights having been
recognized for more than 50 years and of democratic processes in the region,
our countries’ democratic structures are based on a racist model in which
exclusion is clearly manifested. It is Us, the more than 200 million of Afro-descendants
in the Americas, who suffer it. And more than 50% are women.
AWID: What does the
Women’s Network expect from this International Decade? Are you planning any
actions?
DW: We think this Decade
is a great opportunity for advancing our rights. The United Nations has its own
agenda for the Decade, endorsed by its Member States. This means they are
committing to comprehensive and quality healthcare for women and to education
for all, and the need to create and promote economic policies that will help to
fight poverty, etc.
Our Network, present in 22 countries across
the region, are pushing for a series of claims that are part of our local and
national agendas and we want to continue doing international advocacy, as we
did in Cairo, Beijing and Durban. We are demanding visibility in national
census and statistics; protection for children, adolescents and youth;
protection for the environment; food safety and sovereignty; protection for
migrants; recovering our legacy and having it recognized; access to justice;
citizens’ security; and our sexual and reproductive rights.
We already have working groups and experts
developing indicators for the Post-2015 Agenda and we
are contributing to that process. We indeed believe that this Decade offers us
an opportunity to present our agenda and we want to do it on different fronts,
including the women’s and the Afro-descendant movements in their
struggles. We also want our allies and alliances to advocate for
our agenda, because in those 22 countries there are Black women, Indigenous
women, Non-Black women, feminists, women’s movements… so we want our agenda to
be part of a comprehensive agenda that can be visible on all those fronts. This
is also why we are speaking of International Cooperation, because we are
telling States, institutions and governments in each country that they must
make commitments and have budgets to realize them. We always require the
support of cooperation agencies for our actions.
AWID: On June 26-28 the
First Latin American Summit of Afro-descendant Women Leaders from the Americas
took place in Nicaragua. What were the results of this Summit?
DW: Two tools that we consider essential
for our actions were approved. We built our “Political Platform Towards the
International Decade for People of African Descent”, which includes 17 issues
and 71 claims for advocacy with the States in each country on the continent. In
addition we built an instrument for Monitoring. With both tools we are going to
work on the 17 issues and we will prioritize a few each year, promote and
monitor them, with concrete goals so we don’t get frustrated. These tools will
allow us to organize the work in this next decade. At the end of the Decade we
will be able to assess what worked well, what was achieved and what fell by the
wayside.
Now comes a second, post-Summit, step,
which is to develop National Work plans and lobby States from the local to the
national levels for their effective implementation and for carrying out a
coordinated monitoring process. A country might choose three issues for a year
while another one decides to take on just one, with its indicators and goals –
which is what we will be developing now. We want to have a first Work plan for
July 2015-July 2016, follow it up, evaluate it and then choose other issues for
the next year, and so on.
The Network’s webpage will have an
Observatory and we will feed it with the axes and goals selected by the
different countries, and with what will be happening along the way.
AWID: Besides agreeing
on those tools, what else was important about this First Summit?
DW: Bringing together these 254 Afro-descendant women
leaders was key. We had the chance to exchange information and views on our
realities in each country, and we reached consensus for our actions in the
coming years. We were also very effective in getting funding agencies to commit
together with us so this Political Platform can effectively pull through and
also create an Afro-descendant Women’s Fund for the Decade.
After this Summit we will have to work to
make Us visible in national statistics, because in 2016 -2018 many countries
will undergo a census and we are telling them that the ethnic-racial category
must be included.
We are now engaged in dialogue with Indigenous,
feminist and other Black women leaders who are not part of the Network but are
in elected positions because we want to articulate the next steps with them.
What was agreed at the Summit is that we
want to transform the reality Black women experience in Latin America and the
Caribbean. This is why we have launched the Platform and the demands, to move
forward in realizing our rights.
We want afro descent women to have a decent
life, access to jobs, to funding for their productive enterprises; and have access
to education, to health, that their sexual and reproductive health rights are
respected, that we are visible in the statistics is each country so that women
leaders of African descent in public offices can decide directly on our needs
and interests.